


Worse Things

by rosecake



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-04 13:29:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12772071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/pseuds/rosecake
Summary: Jyn gets injured on a mission and Bodhi's torn between finishing things and going back for her.





	Worse Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artemis1000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/gifts).



Bodhi was the only one in the shuttle awake. 

There were a few Alliance troopers in the back, men and women he'd never met before, all of them getting much needed rest before they got to Rhyoan and the mission started. Jyn was in the co-pilot's seat next to him, and she was upright, but he could tell by the slump of her shoulders that she was asleep too. 

He'd taken a stim-shot earlier, but it was starting to wear off, and he could feel his own exhaustion start to eat its way into him. He needed to be awake to fly the shuttle, though, so he shook it off. 

He'd spent years daydreaming of being a fighter pilot, but in the end he always wound up back in a shuttle. After everything Rogue One had been through to get the Death Star plans the Alliance had offered him an X-Wing, but he hadn't taken them up on it. The squadrons were too closely knit, too separated out from the rest of the Alliance. He would have spent too much time split up from Jyn and the others, and at the time the thought of that had been intolerable. 

In the end, they'd been split up anyway, even without any of them really wanting it. Chirrut and Baze spent most of their time trying to turn Skywalker into a proper Jedi as soon as possible. And with the Alliance always running low on experienced leadership Jyn and Cassian got assigned to head separate missions more often than they got paired together. As a shuttle pilot Bodhi was sent all over, but he was usually working with at least one of his friends, so he didn't mind it as much as he might have otherwise. 

And, anyway, he was good with shuttles. He was used to them. 

Still, as similar as his new role in the Alliance was to his old with the Empire, there was a treacherous part of him that missed his old job. Between the constant threat of Partisan violence on Jedha and the violent storms on Eadu it hadn't exactly been _safe_ , but there'd been a lot more routine to the danger. The monotony of it had done a lot to subsume the nervous fears rattling around in the back of his head to manageable levels. 

Now that he was working with the Alliance, every new mission brought with it new and exciting possible ways to die. He was getting used to it, though. The fear was easier to manage when he was doing something. There was nothing worse than waiting around on base, trying to distract himself while he waited to find out which of his new friends had died that week. 

So far it hadn't been Jyn, Cassian, Chirrut or Baze. K2 had been torn apart a few times but Cassian had always figured out how to put him back together again. 

Bodhi didn't think their luck was going to hold out forever, but he was grateful for every day that it did. 

Soon they were close enough to Rhyoan to settle into orbit, and Jyn stirred awake as Bodhi cleared their landing with the ground. The Rhyoan officials accepted their fake credentials without question. 

"Let's hope the rest of the mission goes this smoothly," said Jyn.

\------------------------------------

Their mission was supposed to go quickly. Rhyoan was a small planet, fiercely loyal to the Empire, and there were a few small Imperial outposts spread out over the surface. Surface to subspace communications were jammed to protect the secrecy of those outposts, so whenever any of their contacts on the surface had useful information the Alliance had to send someone in person to pick it up.

That's all Jyn and her team were supposed to do: go get the information, come back, and leave as quickly as possible. It should have taken them a few hours at the most. 

Bodhi tried not to worry when he hadn't heard from Jyn in five hours, but unfortunately there wasn't much else to do in the shuttle while he waited. He almost jumped out of his skin when the console finally lit up with a transmission. 

There was a crackle of static from the dash as the comm came alive, and then the sound of Jyn's voice. "Bodhi?" 

His chest tightened immediately. The comm was audio-only, he couldn't see her, but he could hear the pain and tension in her voice. 

"I'm here," he said, and she didn't respond immediately. "Jyn? Are you okay?" 

"Yes," she said, finally, her voice cracking on the word, and Bodhi didn't believe her. 

"Where are you? Are you at the safe house?" 

"The safe house turned out to be extremely unsafe," she said. She stopped talking, and for a few seconds all Bodhi heard was her labored breathing. She sounded as if she'd been running. "I'm four blocks down from the Imperial facility we talked about during the briefing. Can you come to me?" 

That was bad. He didn't like leaving the shuttle unguarded, not when it was their only way off the planet, and she wouldn't be asking him to come to her if she could swing back on her own.

"Give me a minute," he said. "I'll be right there."

\------------------------------------

Jyn didn't spend a lot of time explaining what had gone wrong when he found her. Not because she was trying to keep him in the dark, but because talking seemed to cause her pain.

"There's more going on here than we thought," she said. "The original intelligence we got said it was weapons manufacturing, guns, but it's worse than that. It's _poison_. They're going to kill so many people, and it's going to take them no effort to do it." 

"Okay," said Bodhi, still trying to process how badly south their mission had gone. "Where's the rest of the team? We can-" 

Jyn shook her head, and it finally clicked that she'd called Bodhi away from the shuttle because there was nobody else on their team left. And he felt bad about it, but his first thought was still _better the rest of them than Jyn._

"One of the lab techs managed to smuggle out the facility's records," said Jyn, holding out a hard disk. "You need to make sure the Alliance gets it. Hopefully they can figure out a cure, or an antidote, or _something_ that can help." 

"You say that like you're not coming with me," he said, taking the hard disk from her hands. 

"I'm not," she said, and he'd been expecting that, but he still hated to hear her say it. "They've got their production set up here, in the labs. If I can destroy them, I can buy the Alliance time. There aren't many people around and they're mostly loyalist, so it's not that heavily guarded." 

"We can do that later," protested Bodhi. "You can come with me, and the Alliance can send a second team if they think-" 

"No," said Jyn, interrupting him. "They'll have increased security or moved production by then. There's no time to wait." 

"Then we can do it together," he said, trying to swallow down the panic that was rising in his throat. He had a lot of faith in Jyn but he wasn't sure she could survive any kind of mission like this, not in the condition she was in. 

Jyn shook her head. The alley was dark, and so were her clothes, and he couldn't quite make out where or how she'd been injured. He could smell the blood, though. 

"Getting this information to the Alliance is the most important thing, especially if I'm not successful. You can send a team back for me after you get it to them." 

"No," he said. He didn't think she was going to live long enough for a team to come back and extract her, and he knew she thought the same thing. His heart was pounding, so hard the rush of blood threatened to drown out all other noise. "No, Jyn, I'm not leaving you here." 

"This is important, Bodhi," she said, and his hands tightened around the hard disk, causing the hard metal edges of it to dig into his skin. "It's more important than me." 

Most of the time Jyn didn't really remind him all that much of her father. As far as appearances went she took more after her mother. And Galen's temperament had been completely different, too. More reserved, more sorrowful where Jyn was prone to anger. 

And then there were times like that very moment, when the similarities were so overwhelming he could barely keep the two of them separate in his head. 

"I can't leave you," he said, even though he'd done this before, he'd lived out this moment before. He knew he was going to leave, because it was important, and people were depending on him. People other than Jyn. "I can't do this again." 

She sighed and stepped closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said. "I really don't want to do this to you, Bodhi, but there's no other options. We don't have much time." 

"Fine," he said. "I'll make sure the Alliance gets this. But I'm coming back for you, Jyn." 

She smiled, like she thought he was lying but she appreciated the effort. "Thank you, Bodhi."

\------------------------------------

Jyn probably wanted him to take the hard disk back to Home One and place it safely in Mon Mothma's hands himself, but if she'd had her heart set on that then she should have done it herself instead of leaving it to Bodhi. The jammers over Rhyoan were designed to block communications from the planet's surface, and so their signals didn't extend that far into space. He didn't need to make it all the way back to Home One, he just needed to get far enough out to pick up a subspace signal.

The real problem was the data itself. The upload was going to take longer than he wanted, but the encryption was going to take even longer. The computer told him it was going to take two hours, and was pretty sure Jyn didn't have two hours. He could still smell blood, even in the clean interior of the shuttle. 

He punched in the override. It wouldn't take nearly as long if he skipped the encryption process. There was a pretty high risk of interception, but who really gave a damn if the Empire got ahold of their own data? Someone at Rebel headquarters could scream at him about the breach of protocol later. He was fine with that. 

By the time the screen told him the upload was ninety-five percent complete he already had the shuttle turned back towards the planet's surface. The Rhyoan officials, having already cleared him, didn't so much as comm him.

\------------------------------------

Bodhi ran through the city streets, probably drawing more attention to himself than he should. There was a scarf draped over his head, and he kept his face down, but neither of those things was doing much to obscure his appearance. He had a blaster strapped to his side, hidden by his coat, and the weight of it might be reassuring if he were any good with a blaster. He'd set his comm to ping off of Jyn's and he followed the instructions it gave him, and he could only pray that she hadn't dropped hers in an alley somewhere.

In the end, though, he didn't need the comm to tell him where to go. A building to the northeast of him exploded, and as much as he hated explosions, he knew that was where he'd find Jyn. He hoped she hadn't been at the center of it. He hoped she had better self-preservation instincts than that, but he wasn't sure. None of them were great at self-preservation. 

He screamed her name as soon as he got close, knowing he was drawing too much attention to himself, but hopefully the Imperials were too busy putting out the fire in their facility to notice him. 

"Shut up," said Jyn, appearing in the alley from one of the side streets. Her hand was pressed to her side, and the scent of blood clung even heavier around her than it had before. There were bruises on her face that hadn't been there before. "They're going to hear you." 

"I don't think it matters," said Bodhi, pulling her close to him. They needed to run, but he wanted to put his hands on her for a just a second, just to to be sure she was really there and really alive. "They mostly seem dead." 

"There are still enough of them left to take out the two of us," said Jyn, disentangling herself from Bodhi. He lead her back towards the shuttle, but she stumbled after the first block, and after that he picked up her up and carried her the rest of the way. Normally Jyn wouldn't tolerate being carried, but she didn't seem to have the energy to object. 

Bodhi tried very hard not to think about it too much.

\------------------------------------

The shuttle wasn't parked that far from where he'd found her, but his muscles were still screaming by the time they made it back. Hauling around equipment didn't compare to running around carrying another human being.

He strapped Jyn into the co-pilot's seat, and was almost sick when his hands came away bloody, but he wanted off the planet before he did anything about it. It wasn't until they were well on their way and he was pretty sure nobody was following them that he put the shuttle on auto-pilot and carefully unbuckled her again. 

She inhaled sharply at being jostled. Her eyes were only half open, and he fished through the first aid kit until he found the painkiller patches. He only put one on her, even though she could probably use a half-dozen, because he wasn't sure how much of it she could handle with her injuries. 

"You came back for me," she said. 

"Did you think I wouldn't?"

"I didn't really want you to," she said, sighing. 

"Jyn," he said. He didn't really know how else to respond to that. 

"I didn't want both of us to wind up dead," she said.

He helped her out of her jacket, and with the outer clothing off it was a lot easier to see what had happened to her. There was a hole in the fabric of her shirt where a blaster had grazed her right side, leaving a deep mark in her skin, and there were deep lacerations in her shoulder, probably from shrapnel. The fabric of her shirt clung to her where the blood had dried as he helped her peel it off, too, and she looked even worse without anything to cover the bruising. 

"There are worse things than dying," said Bodhi. He thought about leaving it at that, but then he added, "Outliving the people you care about, for one."

"I know," she said, and there was a sharp intake of breath as Bodhi pressed a bacta patch to her side. He wasn't entirely convinced she was out of the woods yet. "It wasn't that long ago that I did have to worry about caring about people." 

"Things are different now," said Bodhi, smoothing down the bandage. The wounds on her shoulder were deeper, and would need to be cleaned out first, and he didn't look forward to doing that to her. 

"Yeah," she said. "I haven't decided if it's better or worse." 

Bodhi sighed. "Jyn," he said, and she didn't so much as flinch as he poured disinfectant over her shoulder. 

"Sorry, was that too cynical?" she said. "I didn't really mean it." 

"I know you didn't," he said, plastering bandages over her shoulder. She had a million other scraps and bruises, but they only had so much bacta. He was saving it for the serious injuries. 

He had to help her get on a clean shirt when he was done, but she could at least manage to sit upright unassisted.

"You know you really didn't have to come back for me," she said. "You don't owe me anything." 

"It's not about owing you anything," said Bodhi, even though he did feel like he owed her something. He still felt like he owed Galen something, too. He felt like he owed everyone he knew and had ever known something, even though he couldn't quite figure out what it was, or how he was ever going to pay it back. But that wasn't why he'd gone back. 

He thought about lying, or at least minimizing, but there were so many people who'd died that he was never really honest with. "I went back because I love you." 

Jyn was quiet, and for a second he was afraid she wasn't going to respond to him at all. "I love you, too," she said, and he would have been a lot happier if she'd sounded less sad about it.

\------------------------------------

She assured him that she could make it back to Home One fine, they didn't need to stop and find her a real hospital on the way. Still, despite her assurances, he didn't sleep at all the first night. He stayed awake, watching her, for the whole twelve hours she slept.

She moved easier when she woke up, and spoke easier, and Bodhi could feel some of the tension ease out of him. The second night, after she went to sleep, he slept too. He didn't sleep easily, but he rarely did. The result of too many stims, probably.

The third night, even though there were plenty of free bunks in the shuttle, Jyn crawled into the same one as him.

"Are you sure?" he said, hesitant about touching her. There was barely any part of her that wasn't bruised or covered in bandages.

"I wouldn't have come if I wasn't sure," she said, sliding into the bed beside him. "You don't move around that much in your sleep, right? It'll be fine."

"Jyn-"

"It'll be fine," she said, putting a hand on his chest. There was something calming about her presence, her touch, and he felt himself relax.

"Promise?"

"Yes," she said, pulling the blanket up so that it covered both of them. "I promise."


End file.
